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Comments & ID Thoughts
Found this on a wall of our house in central North Carolina,USA. Google Lens doesn't help. Don't see anything identical online.
- Submitted by:
- Submitted: Dec 18, 2019
- Photographed: Dec 18, 2019
- Spider: Unidentified
- Location: Burlington , North Carolina, United States
- Spotted Indoors: Other
- Found in web?: No
- Attributes:
It’s hind end is just as it’s shown. No poor lighting. It’s dark to black. Looking at him closely, I couldn’t identify a fiddle on his back.
I tried Google Lens on the photo to see what results. I’m a tester for it and I give input on improving identifications of living things. It actually pointed in the right direction, I think, to either family Thomisidae (Crab Spiders) or Philodromidae (Running Crab Spiders). This is something I recommended for the app. I asked that it not give a species level answer unless it was very probable. Too many people have been getting “Brown Recluse” as an incorrect answer, which leads to unnecessary panic. I asked for it to only go to the taxonomic level of adequate certainty.… Read more »
Many thanks for your help! Crab spiders aren’t anything to worry about, right?
You’re welcome! And yes this isn’t something to worry about. They focus on grabbing prey that is a size that they can eat. Their main self-defense is not being seen. They might be capable of biting a mammal that grabs them if their fangs are facing flesh at that moment, but that is unlikely. They hunt by lunging and grabbing, like a crab, and pushing their fangs into the body of the prey. That would be really scary if they were giant or we were the size of a bumblebee.